Schools are broken

AI will bring about the biggest disruption we've seen in centuries

Today I want to talk about a topic close to my heart: education. Most kids are born curious but then they go to school. AI will change that for the better.

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In the late 11th century a curious man walked the streets of Bologna. This man was fascinated by the old Roman laws, namely the Corpus Juris Civilis, which was a monumental compilation created centuries earlier.

This man soon filled the local scriptoriums with astonishing discussions. Word started spreading that something was happening: a dedicated effort to interpret and teach the “laws of old”. Soon students started flocking to Bologna from all four corners of the Carolingian Empire.

This man was Irnerius, a legal scholar. He was the founder of the School of Glossators, which is believed by many was the precursor of the world’s first university¹: the University of Bologna in 1088 AD.

Source: Flickr

The genius of Irnerius were transformed into teaching best practices at the University. Students would gather around in lecture halls listening to accomplished scholars. After listening for ample time, students would present their own theses, their own arguments, prepared to defend them in front of the scholars. If the committee of scholars deemed the arguments well founded and articulate, the student was elevated amongst their ranks and awarded a diploma.

This is how it happened a thousand years ago and this is how it happens today.

Baumol says hi

Ever since the 11th century we invented the printing press, explored the planet, sent people to the Moon, built computers and now most corners of the world are debating whether we are about to meet the first non-human intelligence that we actually created.

In a thousand years we became smart enough to play God, yet we couldn’t figure out a better way to teach the next generation about how the world works.

One classroom can still only fit so many students. Even though we computerized almost every single part of our lives, there are a few things that remain constant:

You still need four musicians to play Mozart’s Dissonance.

You still need one math teacher for ~20 ten year old kids.

You still need to spend 45 minutes in a classroom.

That’s because value created from the interaction between humans is can’t be computerized. Engineers make orders of magnitude more money than they did a hundred years ago, but that’s mainly because their output is also orders of magnitude higher thanks to the machines they invented along the way.

Teacher’s wages increased too, but their productivity remained constant. When you compare the productivity difference between Carpentry Guilds of the Renaissance Era with IKEA factories, innovations like online courses or MOOC seem like a statistical error.

This is what we call the Baumol Effect. Humans are getting more expensive, and when tech doesn’t collapse all other costs, service prices go up.

The end result is clear: vastly unaffordable education and healthcare services.

Learning is personal

Let’s face it, most of us hate studying but love learning. Last week I finally got my official ADHD diagnosis which confirmed why I was a complete mess at school.

My working memory is very well developed and I can perform mental tasks at speeds significantly above average. However I get exhausted quickly and my performance gets sluggish once my batteries run out.

In other words, my brain is a sprinter not a marathon runner. My brain is wired to solve crises, perform extraordinary feats in very short periods of time, then collapse.

Then you take a kid like that and put him in a classroom for 7 hours a day and watch how chaos unfolds.

The more impersonal my education experience was the worse my academic performance became. This translated to my own university studies. When I had tutors I was top of my class with minimal effort. When I didn’t, I struggled. I mostly didn’t so I never graduated.

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The human brain is wired to learn through conversation, play and experiments. That’s how we learn as toddlers. I’m reading Scattered Minds from Dr Gabor Mate to help me understand my brain better. In his book he highlights that the human brain grows to about 95% of its final size by the age of five. This rapid development presents itself in curious ways.

In the early years as many as 3 billion synaptic connections are created per second in a child’s brain, causing the little human to start asking an endless stream of questions, resulting in what adults only know as "the why phase”.

Learning is personal, because we literally developed our brain by looking at our primary caregiver and asking a bunch of questions.

But you can’t give every kid a tutor can you?

Artificial Professor

One thing I noticed ever since ChatGPT came out is that I use it as an extension of my brain. I have millions of unfinished, half-baked thoughts and I can just prompt ChatGPT to finish them. Format them. Help me understand myself.

ChatGPT helps me discover my own ideas, because I can ask why as many times I want. This resulted in me learning more and acquiring more skills in the last two years than in the previous ten combined.

So maybe there is a way to give a tutor to every child.

Well, not maybe anymore. In Benin City, Nigeria, pupils of Edo Boys High School participated in a study. Some of the students got tutoring from an AI system. Another group was used as control who didn’t.

Below are the results, with an extraordinary, 0.3 standard deviation difference in favor of the AI-supported students.

As you can read from the World Bank post: “These findings provide strong evidence that generative AI, when implemented thoughtfully with teacher support, can function effectively as a virtual tutor.”

Let me give you another quote from the World Bank article:

The learning improvements were striking—about 0.3 standard deviations. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to nearly two years of typical learning in just six weeks.

Information Overload

I’ll celebrate my 34th birthday in a few weeks. I got married recently and God willing, I will become a father in the next two years. I contemplate a lot about the opportunities and hurdles my future child will have to face.

If they inherit my brain, the education system will give them a similar experience to what I had: hell.

But why? Why did education more or less work for a thousand years and why is it failing now? Economics cannot be it. At least not all of it.

Students of Irnerius lived in a world where less than 10% of Europeans were literate. Books were copied by hand not printed. According to scholars humanity didn’t have more than half a million books or manuscripts back then.

Assuming an average word is 5 characters and each character in UTF-8 encoding is 1 byte, a single book would require about half a megabyte. With half a million books, that would be about 250 GB.

My PC has a 2.5TB hard drive which is ten times more than the total knowledge of the entire human race in 1088 AD.

The current way of learning was designed for a world where knowledge is scarce.

Today it’s the opposite. Those who cannot filter out important information from the unimportant one and treat knowledge as the ultimate end goal are suffering from intellectual obesity. Gurwinder wrote a fantastic piece about this.

The Intellectual Obesity Crisis

Yet schools try to prepare kids for this by trying to cram even more knowledge into their heads. The only problem with that is that humanity now creates over 400 MILLION Terabytes of data every single day, so chances are whatever you learn will become obsolete pretty quickly.

The School of Tomorrow

Clearly the educational institution that my future kid will need does not exist today. It must be invented. The study in Nigeria gives us hope. Give every kid a personal tutor and they will seem like geniuses, learning 2 years of curriculum in 6 weeks.

Maybe that way kids would have more time to focus on more important skills like critical thinking, creativity, social skills or entrepreneurship.

I’m probably not qualified enough to crack this, although I sent this pitch to OpenAI when they announced their startup fund a year ago (they never answered).

But there are people who think like this. One I find incredibly exciting is the Alpha School. It’s a school founded by MacKenzie Price, where kids only spend 2 hours per day with academics using an AI tutor instead of a classroom setting and then spend the rest of the day building life skills like running an Airbnb or public speaking.

I’m really interested to see more schools like this pop up (and I REALLY hope one will pop up in Hungary in the next five years).

This will become a killer app for AI systems, an entire generation growing up learning from AI that guides them to success.

Note that this doesn’t negate the human teacher’s role. The AI tutor supports the academic learning, freeing up the teacher to act more like a mentor or a role model.

When this happens, the world will change forever.

1. This title is at best debatable as one of my subscribers, Clement pointed it out. UNESCO calls it the oldest university in the Western world”. This is because the Al Quaraouiyine mosque was founded 200 hundred years prior in 859 AD by Fatima Al-Fihri. The university is still in operation as of today as a living memento of the Islamic Golden Age. The source of the debate is that while teaching activities have been frequent since the foundation, the university operated as a mosque and only transformed into a teaching institution in the Marinid period (1244-1465).